


Older and Wiser

by Kyra



Category: Sound of Music (1965)
Genre: Historical, Multi, Nazis, War, World War II, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:54:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyra/pseuds/Kyra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rolfe at war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Older and Wiser

**Author's Note:**

  * For [halotolerant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/gifts).



> Things happen.
> 
>       - Ovid in the Third Reich, Geoffrey Hill
> 
>  
> 
> Title from "Sixteen Going on Seventeen".

_Dear Liesl. Stop. I’d like to tell you how I feel about you. Stop. Unfortunately, this wire is already too expensive. Sincerely, Rolfe._

_   
_

_Winter 1942_

Most of the others have pictures. Sweethearts from home or their dear old mothers, which the rest of the men used to tease them about in their clipped accents.

Rolfe has no pictures, and doesn’t know what he’d have if he did.  His mother’s never sat for a photograph in her life.  Liesl, but he doesn’t let himself think about that.  Salzburg itself, and the mountains, maybe. Untersberg, Monchsberg, Kapuzinerberg.  It’s hard to believe the Alps ever existed from here, in the thick, cold, Russian mud.

**

Rolfe’s father’s name was Rolfe, too.  When he was small, they called him Young Rolfe, and then his father died, and he was just plain Rolfe.  His father’s uniform lay folded in the bottom of his trunk, a stiff, old-smelling thing.  His father was a hero.  His father fought for the Kaiser.

In school, they sang “German Austria, you wonderful country.”  From Salzburg on a clear day, you could see the border, which didn’t used to be a border at all.  Everything was so simple.

**

Dear Liesl. Stop. Here they call me the Osterlander and long ago they called me the Telegram Boy. Stop. In between they’ve called me nothing at all. Stop. Therefore I must sign this No Longer Your Rolfe.

**

The summer when everything was beginning to begin, he rode his bicycle two or three times a week past the Captain’s house to where Colonel Schneider from Berlin was staying, across the lake.  The Colonel always took his telegrams immediately, in rooms full of serious looking men, and read them while Rolfe waited to see if there was a reply.

Sometimes the Colonel asked what his father had done, or what other houses took regular telegrams, or what Rolfe thought of the Fuhrer, an Austrian himself.

“Good lad,” said the Colonel.

The men wore crisp uniforms and well-oiled sidearms.  After they knew Rolfe, they nodded at him when he came in.  By the time the Anschluss had come and the Captain had vanished, hiding from his appointment in the Reich, it was easy to say: “I know how to get it to him.”

To find Liesl in town and think, when he handed her the telegram, what the officers would say about her and her family, their disloyal hearts.

**

By now Rolfe’s seen more people die than live in all Salzburg, it seems.  Hundreds and hundreds of men, uniforms bloodsoaked.  His lieutenant, nearly all his unit, men in the rubble-filled streets.  Fritz, who’d come from Vienna, a year younger than Rolfe.

And the men whose coughs started weeks before they died and the starving men and the Croatian he found frozen solid on guard duty.

**

A long time ago, before Poland, after the Anschluss, in his first heady days in uniform, the Captain had said, "Come away with us."  Half-smiling like it was a privilege to desert his country for a fantasy Austria, an ideal that didn’t exist.  A world of edelweiss and dreams.

"Come away with us,” he’d said.  “Before it's too late."

And Rolfe didn’t, of course.  It didn't even bear thinking about.  But now, in this late cold, it swims around his mind, a fish, a whizzing bullet.

**

In a way there are two Rolfes, there have been two Rolfes for years and years now.  The Rolfe who ran away that night, who crouched silently in the car full of children as it fled the abbey and Salzburg and Austria.  And there is this Rolfe, whose boots belong to a dead man, who could count his own ribs if he ever took off his clothes in the bitter cold, who’s seen so many men die, so many hundreds of men all around him that the fact he’s still here stopped making sense so long ago.

**

Dear Rolfe. Stop. How do you find Switzerland or Britain or America. Stop. Warmest greetings from Russia. Cordially, Rolfe.

**

And where would he be now?  Married to Liesl, living among the enemy like a rat, having fat blond babies and hiding his face from the world?  The whole world is war.  There is no other place, or life, or Rolfe.

**

He turns 21 in the bloody snow in Stalingrad, where it takes three hours to move half a block in the rubble, hiding from Soviet snipers.  In his pocket is a message he’s to deliver.  There are always messages that say help is coming. Stand fast. Help is coming.  His empty rifle banging against his thigh.

**

Dear Fritz. Stop. They’ve bombed out the airfields but they say the Fuhrer’s army will break through any day now. Stop.  How is it where you are, are the rations any good? Rolfe.

**

Fritz was young and he smirked at Rolfe when he first arrived, but pinned down with gunfire whizzing over their heads, his hands shook so badly he dropped his ammunition.  Later, Rolfe had him practice it for hours, loading and reloading in the cold, empty house where they bunked. 

Even these heavy months later, Fritz seems more real than Liesl or the nuns of Salzburg or his mother in the kitchen.  Fritz frowning in concentration.  His hot breath.  Washing in the morning, before his ribs and spine stood out like knobs, like knives.

**

Rolfe got the job at the telegraph office when he was fifteen because he already knew the names of every family in the big houses by the lake.  The mayor and his wife, Herr Renner, Herr Schmidt, Captain von Trapp, the war hero who’d fought for the empire, before Austria lost her seacoast.  Lights from their houses shone on the dark lawns, glowing square after square.

**

“What’s worst,” Fritz liked to say, “is the cold.  And the hunger.  But if they could just get rid of those, I think Russia’d be a lovely place.  Except for all the typhoid.”

“Have you picked out yet where you’ll build your summer home?” he’d say, the anti-aircraft guns booming in the distance, and laugh until it turned into a coughing fit.

**

And when Rolfe met Liesl, pretty as a daisy, open-faced and trusting.  The things he’d wanted to prove to her about himself.  All the things he was going to do.

**

Dear Liesl. Stop. Do you remember the apfelstrudel my mother used to bake. Stop.  The schnitzel and the gulasch?  Apples in the autumn in the orchards where I rode my bicycle, cheese on bread in the afternoon, how the air outside your house in the evenings smelled heavy and warm with food, you, the rich, inside eating it, clink of silverware on plates stop Liesl Liesl

**Author's Note:**

> [More information on the Battle of Stalingrad](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad)


End file.
